Sunday, April 15, 2012

Travelogue: Titanic Exhibit at Henry Ford Museum

The Titanic
has long held a prominent place in the human imagination and commemorations
abound during this year’s 100th anniversary of its sinking.

Among them is Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition hosted by the Henry Ford Museum in
Dearborn, Michigan. Similar exhibitions
are also appearing in Atlanta, Houston, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Orlando and San
Diego with upcoming shows scheduled in Columbia, SC, St. Petersburg, FL and
Philadelphia.

The 10,000 square foot exhibition
reflects the size and grandeur of the world’s largest and most luxurious ship
of its time. Room re-creations of a
first class hallway and cabin as well as a full-scale replica of the Grand
Staircase reveal the ship’s splendor while the passengers’
accommodations, menus, china, even the recovered tile floors of the bathrooms
illustrate the attention given to social class
distinctions in Edwardian England.

First Class Cabin -- Courtesy of Henry Ford Museum

“The ship is like a palace,” says
Hugh Woolner, first class passenger in one of many quotes highlighted on the
walls of the exhibit. “My cabin is
ripping. Hot and cold water, very
comfy-looking bed—and lots of room.”

The exhibit captures the human tragedy of the
event by featuring small fragments of people’s lives with many of the objects probably
handled shortly before the ship met its fate on Monday, April 15 at 2:20 a.m.

Third Class Cabin -- Courtesy of Henry Ford Museum

This includes chinaware (a cobalt blue border
with interlocking gold trim for first class and plain, white with only the
White Star Line insignia in the center for third class), sherry glasses
(congratulating the Captain at a party), cut-glass butter dish (indicating
second class rather than first class crystal), cooking pots tarnished from the
sea one with food burned on it and the other with a hole burned through it.

Some artifacts come with stories. First class passenger Adolphe Saalfeld, 47,
a perfume maker from Manchester, England, lost 65 vials of perfume. He was headed to America to market some new
fragrances to department stores in New York and other major cities. He survived but it would be decades before
62 of the vials were recovered from his Swiss-made leather suitcase—some with
perfume and scents still in them.

The exhibit does a good job of placing visitors
in the mood and setting of Titanic
through various techniques. Its bright
and colorful First Class area is accompanied by classical violin music until
visitors move through to the crew’s quarters on E Deck (with bunk beds
accommodating 50 men to a room) where they begin to feel the foreshadowing of
the ship’s fate. The space becomes dark
with red safety lights as visitors pass through the mammoth watertight doors
that separated Titanic’s 15
compartments. The sound of pulsing
engines gives way to the moans of the sea as the ship hits the iceberg and
becomes engulfed in the ocean’s calm, icy waters.

The doors were designed to close should any of
the compartments fill with water thus giving the ship the reputation of being
“practically unsinkable.” The ship
could have survived with two flooded compartments, but the iceberg cut six slits
over 300 feet into the hull and filled five compartments, according to ship’s
designer Thomas Andrews.

Young visitors instantly get the message.

“This is so creepy,” said one. “You have
to think about what happened to the ship.”

In the final section of the exhibit, visitors
are treated to a simulation that explains how Titanic hit the iceberg, broke apart and sank to the bottom of the
sea with debris strewn over an area of 15 square miles. Another film illustrates how conservators
decades later used the ROV to extract the artifacts.

Many parts of the ship are on display including
an angle iron (which visitors could touch), lifeboat davit cleat, ship’s
whistle, telegraph and the stern’s docking bridge telephone stand.

A chunk of ice in the shape of an iceberg is
also available for visitors to touch.

Passengers’ eyewitness descriptions of the ship
hitting the iceberg and its aftermath make the event more real:

At the end of the exhibit is a memorial wall
with the names of individual passengers and crew on board Titanic’s maiden voyage.
This, too, elicits a more empathetic response to the tragedy as visitors
check to see if the person whose passenger ticket they have been carrying since
the onset of their tour survived or not.

In first class, 201 passengers were saved and
123 lost. In second class, 118 were
saved and 166 lost. In third class 183
were saved and 527 were lost. Among the
crew, 212 were saved and 698 were lost, including Captain Edward J. Smith.

Several recovered artifacts recall several
ironic missteps that would later prove fatal:
the fractured compass bowl that set the ship on a new course of North 71
West (outside established traffic lanes) at 5:45 p.m. in an attempt to avoid ice
by steering the ship further south.

A barometer indicated perfect weather.

The forward masthead light sat in the crow’s
nest to warn other passing ships of Titanic’s
approach.

A 60-pound lump of coal from the 6,000-ton load
that was diverted from coal supplies of other ships due to a coal strike in
England. Titanic needed enough coal to feed its 157 furnaces that heated 29
boilers. This single lump could move
the ship 60 feet at full speed in 1.5 seconds.
Titanic was going at 21 knots, nearly top speed, when it hit the
iceberg. Many passengers originally
scheduled for passage on other vessels were rebooked to cross the Atlantic
Ocean on Titanic due to the coal
strike.

Crow’s nest lookouts Frederick Fleet and
Reginald Lee did not see the iceberg until it was too late and they did not
have access to the ship’s only pair of binoculars. Testimony at the British inquiry following the disaster revealed
that it was common practice for only the chief officer, first officer or second
officer to have binoculars while on duty and not for lookouts who would
otherwise be distracted. The binoculars were recovered and ominously
on display.

The original plan of the ship ordered 32
lifeboats, enough for 1,900 people.
However, only 20 lifeboats, capable of accommodating 1,178 people, were
on the ship. This was done in order to
cut costs and clutter.

Only 714 people survived out of the 2,228
passengers and crew on board while 1,514 perished from hypothermia in the 28
degree waters of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Only two lifeboats were filled to capacity mostly due to the passengers’
reluctance to leave the ship because they believed it to be “practically
unsinkable.”

Titanic’s
resting place is located 400 nautical miles southeast of
Newfoundland. It lay quietly on a sandy
seabed until it was discovered on Sunday, September 1, 1985 by Dr. RobertBallard, a former United States Navy officer and a professor of oceanography at
the University of Rhode Island.

A dive to the wreck with remote operated
vehicles (ROV) takes between 12 to 15 hours, including two-and-a-half hours to
reach the ship and two-and-a-half hours to resurface.

The bow as it looks today

Nearly all of the artifacts are tagged and
stored in climate control environments.
That they have survived the passage of time as well as the trauma of
settling below 12,500 feet of water at a pressure of 6,000 pounds per square
inch is almost miraculous.

Upon retrieval, each object is stabilized to
prevent further degradation due to the sudden change in environment.

The objects are being consumed by bacteria,
abraded by sediments, and corroded by salt and acids. “Rusticles” of bacteria and fungi cling to the ghost ship, which
is also being consumed by iron-eating microbes that will collapse it onto
itself in 40 to 90 years.

The exhibit is dedicated to Millvina Dean, the
last survivor of the Titanic who died at on May 31, 2009 at the age of 97. She was a two-month-old baby when the ship
went down and was saved in Lifeboat 10 with her mother and brother while her
father was lost at sea. Her brother,
Bertram, died at age 82 on April 14, 1992, on the 80th anniversary
of the sinking of the Titanic.

Tickets are $10 extra with admission to the
Henry Ford Museum and the exhibit runs until September 30. Adult admission is $17, seniors 62 or older
is $15 and youth 5-12 years old is $12.50.
For further information, see the museum website.

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